It would sound like a nightmare for any aspiring fashion student: Create a collection of dresses purely out of paper. But for collaborators Matthew Brodie and Hattie Newman, it was a welcome challenge.

Brodie, a photographer, and Newman, a 3-D illustrator, spent long days and nights cutting, tearing, and ripping paper to create wearable couture for a spread in the (now defunct) French-language magazine Madame. Brodie says that a majority of the time was spent eliminating designs. Did he and Newman know what they were getting into for the shoot? “It was a learning curve for us both, but if you can picture it, you can make it,” Brodie tells Co.Design. And make, they did–five dresses in all.

Each dress seems to highlight a different trait of paper. One multi-colored dress is composed of tightly interwoven streamers, while another dress, also made of streamers, shows off paper’s pliability as it billows behind the model. One dress (well, half-dress) is cleverly crimped and seems to be spilling forth from an over-sized pencil sharpener. But it was the intricate mushroom-shaped dress (see slide two) that posed the biggest challenge for Brodie and Newman. It required 16 panels elaborately cut with lacework to seamlessly put the dress together.RG